


Nightmare Scenarios

by Britpacker



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Claustrophobia, Established Relationship, F/M, Jealousy, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-20
Updated: 2013-11-20
Packaged: 2018-01-02 04:40:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1052635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Britpacker/pseuds/Britpacker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nicola faces her fears.  For Malcolm, it's the stuff of nightmares.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nightmare Scenarios

**Author's Note:**

> I’m going slightly off-piste here; it’s still Malcolm/Sam, but with a panicky spanner in the works. 
> 
> If anyone was going to get Nicola Murray into a lift I figure it’d be Malcolm. I just had to find a way of making him regret it! Set during Nicola’s leadership election campaign, with sentences in italics representing a character's thoughts.

“Come the fuck on woman, you were supposed to have started twenty minutes ago!” By the looks he was getting from the two glossy girls behind the business centre’s swanky reception desk she gathered he’d been pacing the lobby hard enough to wear a groove through the highly polished marble floor for considerably longer than that. As her heel slid from underneath her and she pitched forward, arms flailing like a windmill in a hurricane, Nicola Murray only wished he’d managed to cut one deep enough for her to hide in.

Preferably with a tin helmet and a tommy-gun for protection. He wasn’t happy about backing her leadership bid to begin with, and when that fact was combined with her infamous lack of punctuality it was no wonder that Malcolm Tucker was currently, even by his impressive standards, totally fucking furious.

He thrust out an arm to stop her face-planting the floor and as she muttered her thanks Nicola decided to take it as a positive sign that he didn’t allow her to completely humiliate herself. “I’m sorry, Malcolm, my constituency secretary’s been on the phone and I’m not great at that walk-talk combination thing,” she continued, brushing herself down and feeling, as she usually did around him, decidedly less put-together than she had been five minutes ago. “I didn’t realise I was keeping people waiting…”

His Blackberry shrilled into action, mercifully sparing her the venomous riposte she knew was coming from the familiarly evil gleam in his eyes. “Ollie, yeah, I know, she’d be late for her own fuckin’ funeral, but we’re on our way up now. Yeah, just arrived and tried to break her own fucking neck before I could do it for her, tell Helen she can cut the crap lap dance, OK? Be with you in two.”

Before Nicola could object he had pocketed the phone and grasped her arm, steering her at a determined pace the length of the cavernous lobby. “Oh no, Malcolm! I’m not getting into the fucking lift!”

Her voice went up an octave on every word until the fancy chandeliers overhead were a-quiver but he remained cruelly oblivious, aiming for the hated device with all the unwavering air of purpose she both admired and dreaded. “Malcolm, I can’t!”

“It’s on the eighteenth fucking floor, sweetheart and you’ve been keeping the whole fuckin’ business press waiting for almost half an hour when you’re supposed to be trying to win yourself some influential fucking friends, OK? You want to take up climbing, I’ll book you a trip to the fuckin’ Himalayas, all right?”

He was right. He was usually fucking right. That was the worst thing. “I – you know I get panic attacks in confined spaces, Malcolm. I’m not going to impress the opinion-formers of the business community if I fall out of the fucking lift red in the face and choking, am I?”

“You’re not going to impress the twats by keepin’ them away from the fucking free bar either, are ye?” His voice had turned deadly quiet, every syllable edged with ice. That was a Bad Sign. That was Malcolm being Really Scary.

His phone bleeped again. “Oh, for fuck’s sake! Does that pouty fuckin’ Botox model girlfriend of yours think I’ve got a fucking broomstick to fly you up on?” he roared, and though the outburst was directed, Nicola gathered, at her new advisor rather than herself it rather highlighted the wisdom of not annoying him any further by fighting the fucking inevitable.

“Eighteenth floor?” she said. He nodded. “Oh, fuck! Did Ollie arrange this?”

“Helen.”

“Shit. I never mentioned being claustrophobic.”

The lift opened. Malcolm took a step back. Waved a long, fine-boned hand. 

The room was starting to spin around her. Her chest felt tight. Barely aware of the solid floor beneath her feet, Nicola took the fateful step.

She was OK – just – until the doors hummed shut behind him. “Oh fuck, this is going to kill me,” she whimpered.

“No such fuckin’ luck.” Malcolm struck the requisite button with unwarranted force, probably imprinting a mental image of her face across it. She could hear the motor whirring. Feel the tiny shudder running up through her soles as the metal box began to move.

_Oh God, oh God, oh dear fucking God!_

His breathing sounded ominous as approaching thunder. Beneath her eyelashes Nicola peered at him, so fucking relaxed, directly across the shrinking box from her. Head back; arms dangling loosely at his sides; the glimmer of a smile, faint and mocking, just playing at the corners of his mouth.

Fuck, she hated him! Just for _standing_ there, so fucking smug. Watching her tits wobble with every short, shallow breath. Probably aware of every fucking blood vessel in her face getting closer and closer to bursting as the walls closed in and the thrum of the mechanism reverberated in her brain.

Distraction. She needed a distraction. Something to focus on.

_Oh, shit!_

Those thin, well-cut lips. Those steely eyes. That lean frame encased in its elegant dark grey Armani carapace. That was a distraction, right there; one she usually tried not to dwell on but couldn’t quite bring herself to ignore.

Panic took over. Before her brain could scream a warning Nicola lurched across the lift and kissed him. Hard.

For a moment he froze. Then his hormones kicked in and Malcolm’s lips softened. Before he understood what the fuck was happening, her tongue was rammed down the back of his throat. 

The metallic _ting_ announcing their arrival zinged painfully through his brain before things could get any worse. _Saved by the fucking bell_ : the phrase was as welcome as that snap of the then Health Secretary in _weekend attire_ of silk stockings and French maid’s frock that had landed on his desk during Nick Harrison’s first election campaign. Wrenching himself free of her cloying hold he staggered backwards, almost knocking the reception committee down like pub skittles as he veered between the opening doors.

Shell shock. That’s what it was, this numb disbelief: like being trapped in a blacked-out tunnel. Complete and utter fucking shell shock. 

He was going to murder the crackpot hysterical bitch. Just as soon as he could get her somewhere not filled with gawking fucking hacks, he was going to…

“Malcolm?” 

Nobody else was taking any notice of him; not with Helen and Ollie shrieking like a pair of overgrown groupies at a Take That gig and Nicola stumbling over her own bloody feet – again – while trying that difficult juxtaposition of moving and speaking at the same fucking time. Her voice, oddly shrill but no more than usually incoherent, echoed in his ringing ears, a juxtaposition of incoherent greetings, brays of false laughter and apologies for keeping everyone waiting: so much to do, so little time… 

She sounded like a complete imbecile. _About fucking normal, then!_

Something steamy and scented swam before his eyes. “You look ready for this, if you don’t mind my saying,” the cool, blessedly familiar voice of his wonderful P.A. observed.

He gripped the handle of caffeinated salvation so hard his knuckles cracked. “Sam, you’re a fucking lifesaver,” he grated between his teeth, still glaring at the empty shell of the abandoned lift. “That woman’s dangerous; she’s a fuckin’ lunatic!”

Sam arched a well-marked eyebrow. “You’re comin’ down in that fuckin’ lift with me when she’s bored these poor cunts to sleep, yeah? Let those two tits over there march her down the fucking stairs – or push her down, whatever works, but _you_ are coming with me, right?”

“Malc.” Something of him had rubbed off on her, he realised when she took his arm in a determined grip and steered him expertly toward one of the shallow alcoves set into the magnolia walls of Blandy Towers. That tone, inflexible as a wrought iron bar, was even more alarming in a sweet, Home Counties accent than its more familiar broad Glaswegian. “What did she do to you?”

A scalding sip of coffee – black and strong, just the way he liked it – cracked the synapses in his brain back from their stupor. “It’s OK, she didn’t come at me with a fucking machete, pet.”

His mobile features twisted. For an awful moment Sam thought he might be sick. “Mind you, that’d be preferable to her fuckin’ kissing me again,” he muttered.

Her stomach dropped as if the building had been struck by massive turbulence. For the first time in her life, Sam Cassidy understood the meaning of the phrase “red mist”. It came down so thick, so fast, she could barely see through it.

Which, for the sake of the leadership candidate blathering aimlessly on a small raised platform thirty feet away, was probably just as well. “ _Kissing_ you?” she hissed.

“Yeah.” He had to be shaken, she decided, if he couldn’t see the blood boiling up beneath her fair skin. “Jesus Christ! I’ll be havin’ nightmares for years to come….”

“So will she when I’ve hidden half a dozen fucking spiders in her fucking drawers – cotton and silk ones, not desk ones by the way! Man-eating bitch!”

“Slow down darlin’ it’s not like she fuckin’ raped me or anything.” Her abrupt descent into possessiveness left Malcolm amused and alarmed all at once, but at least it provided distraction from the stream-of-consciousness crap being spouted by his probable future boss. Sam’s delicate features tightened.

“Don’t even joke about it. I’m never letting her get you into a room alone again!”

“I’m certainly never getting into a lift with the deranged fuckin’ clodhopper again; well, not without an armed fucking guard anyway!”

“You won’t need the fucking SAS. You’ve got me.”

“Yeah.” Gradually the shock was wearing off, caffeine and Sam’s charming jealousy combining to thaw the ice griping his guts. Malcolm leaned back against the wall, forcing his unwilling attention to refocus on the woman he was helping install as the least worst alternative to J.B. and his bunch of pony-faced, sheep-shagging alien wankers. 

Immediately he regretted it. “Christ in a curry house, she’s fuckin’ useless!”

“Yep. And dead.”

At least, she thought, she could still make him smile. It wasn’t as if they had much to laugh at nowadays. 

Thanks to their putative next leader both had even less than usual, but while he glowered, Sam plotted. She had, after all, learned that from the best.

Part one was accomplished for her. Nicola, flushed with (presumably) triumph and not champagne on an empty stomach, tottered off in the general direction of eighteen flights of steep, narrow stairs with TweedleTwat and TweedleCunt for protection. The few business correspondents not bored into a coma lurched off in the general direction of the buffet table. The route to the lift was clear.

She slid him a glance. Malcolm nodded.

The moment they were cut off from prying eyes, she launched her attack. Full frontal. His resistance crumbled. By the time they passed the seventeenth floor he was kissing her back, ravaging her mouth while his hands, weapons of torture the equal of his toxic tongue, roved from her carefully groomed hair to her arse and back again. This time, he didn’t even hear the warning ping as their destination approached.

Sam released him just in time, smoothing down her jacket with one hand and his shirt front with the other. “Better?” she mouthed. Picking his jaw up off the floor, Malcolm grinned wolfishly.

“Fuck the nightmares, that’ll be givin’ me wet dreams, yeah?”

“You say the sweetest things.” For a few moments they were safe. Faintly woozy, Sam flashed her long-time lover a teasing smile, reluctant to return to the grim reality of Opposition politics too soon. “I’m still going to find a spider for the strumpet’s desk at least, though.”

He still, she noticed, wore a faint, nasty smile when they reached the safety of their own offices an hour later, which got her wondering. Maybe she wasn’t the one Nicola had to worry about after all


End file.
